The Commission to Enforce Virtue and Combat Vice horrifies Egyptians
With the start of 2012, the Commission to Enforce Virtue and Combat Vice (CEVCV)
The Commission to Enforce Virtue and Combat Vice horrifies Egyptians
With the start of 2012, the Commission to Enforce Virtue and Combat Vice (CEVCV), which was established by the Salafis to follow in the footsteps of its role model in Saudi Arabia, has gone into operation. Religious police in Port Said and Qaliubiya terrorised local residents when they started advocating gender segregation, even asking some shop owners, such as barbershops, to close down their establishments which they claim contradict Wahabi norms.
The Salafi al-Nour Party has denied any link to the CEVCV, even though the commission insisted it was affiliated to the Salafi party. Yet political activist Mohamed Adel thinks an alliance is obvious. “Both embrace the same ideology and enjoy the same Wahabi funding,” he says.
Tourism threatened
Egyptians have responded with distaste to statements released by the CEVCV in which the commission declared it was formed in response to the wishes of the majority of Egyptians, on whose votes Islamists recently sailed into a sweeping majority in the forthcoming parliament. The commission claims that Allah’s teachings must be preferred to the “stinking” concepts of liberalism.
However, many Egyptians on the ground fear the Salafi’s intransigence and their reported tendency to resort to violence against anything they perceive as non-Islamic. This includes workers in tourism or in shops selling or serving alcoholic drinks, and Copts whom the prominent Salafi leader Yasser al-Burhami declared—together with Jews—to be apostates.
In Port Fouad, a group of young, bearded CEVCV men in white Islamic jilbabs brandishing sticks broke into barbershops and warned the barbers against cutting Muslim men’s beards or performing any cosmetic practice that allegedly contradicts Islamic sharia. They declared themselves responsible for monitoring public behaviour on beaches and in gardens, coffee shops and the street; “reforming” the behaviour of citizens and banning any practice that went against the Qur’an and the Sunna. They said they intended to impose Islamic dress code for women, and defined it as the niqab, the full face veil.
Haram and halal
In Qaliubiya, CEVCV members overtly claimed they would apply sharia, and proceeded to attempt that in broad daylight. They broke into garment and hairdressers shops, as well as several trade venues, sermonising about halal (non-sinful) and haram (sinful) practices and, in the process, terrorising all present. They warned shop owners they would be back to follow up on whether the shop owners committed to applying sharia, and threatened them with Allah’s punishment if they did not. They also warned shop owners against employing “indecent” female workers who did not don Islamic dress, and advised them to employ “conservative, decent” women instead. In the case of hairdressers, the CEVCV ordered them to refrain from hair styling or beauty procedures for women, since such practices constituted “an offence to Allah”. They advised them to adopt other “honest” means of breadwinning. The owners of hairdressing salons were ordered to replace male staff with females.
In shopping malls or other shops where they found Christmas trees, the CEVCV members smashed the trees and tore down Christmas decorations, insisting that Christmas was haram.
In other places, CEVCV members attempted to impose gender segregation in transportation facilities by asking for separate vehicles to transport women, while they demanded segregation of male and female students in university classrooms so that they would not sit side by side.
No gender segregation in Egypt
Once the CEVCV had announced that it was founded on the Saudi model, and had sent out a call for volunteers, the Coalition for Supporting Egyptian Tourism (CSET) appealed to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the Cabinet and the Tourism Ministry to take swift action before tourism in Egypt was utterly ruined. The CSET appealed to the Public Prosecutor demanding the arrest of those who were “working to sabotage the economy”.
In his weekly column in the Cairo daily Al-Ahram, Hazem Abdel-Rahman pointed out that since ancient Egyptian times there had never been any kind of gender segregation in Egypt. He said gender segregation went against the nature of Egyptian society, where men and women always worked side by side for a living. “It is unthinkable and unacceptable in our times to stand against gender integration,” he wrote. “These new notions are no more than a means to subdue women and discriminate against them.” Mr Abdel-Rahman said that it was the State’s responsibility to dig out the main funders of the CEVCV, and said it was the role of al-Azhar and other Salafi parties to confront such extreme ideology and behaviour.
Mohamed Adel says the CEVCV uses violence and terrorism against those who oppose their views, while the State has so far been a mere onlooker. Mr Adel expressed his astonishment at the State’s reluctance to take any action against the CEVCV, especially after it threatened in a statement that its representatives would use electric shocks against civilians who refused to obey their orders.
Egypt’s women
So far, however, it appears that the only ones to take action against the CEVCV have been Egypt’s women. When a couple of CEVCV representatives broke into that hairdresser’s in Qaliubiya, the women inside were so outraged that they caught the men and gave them a good beating, shouting: “What d’you think you’re doing? You call yourself men? You’re nothing but half-men.”
At another salon, the women kicked the CEVCV men out. This is all fine as long as these men move only individually or in twos. Once they start moving in groups or using the electric shocks they promise, the tables might very well be turned.